cryonics

Cryonics claims it can store a dead human body at low
temperatures in such a way that it will be possible to
revitalize that body and restore life at some unspecified future
date. One hook the cryonics folks use is to give hope that a
cure for a disease one dies of today will be found tomorrow,
allowing that cure to be applied to the thawed body before or
while bringing the dead person back to life.
Cryonics might be called resurrection by technology and
believers in it might be classified as suffering from the
Moses syndrome. The simple fact
is once you are dead, you are dead forever. This fact may seem
horrifying, but it is not nearly as horrifying as the thought of
living forever.

The
technology exists to freeze or preserve people and that
technology is improving and will probably get better. The
technology to revivify a frozen body exists in the imagination.
Nanotechnology, for example, is a technology that supporters
of cryonics appeal to. Someday, they say, we'll be able to
rebuild anything, including diseased or damaged cells in the
body, with
nanobots. So, no matter what disease destroyed healthy
cells in the living body before preservation and no matter what
damage was done to the cells of the frozen body during storage, nanotechnology
will allow us to bring the dead back to
life. This seems like wishful
thinking. Nanotechnology might rebuild a mass of dead
tissue into a mass of healthy tissue, but without a complete
isomorphic model of the brain it will be impossible to return a mushy
brain to the exact state it was in before death
occurred. (Of course, since this is an exercise in imagination,
one can posit that some day we will be able to preserve the
brain without any decomposition or transformation at all.) In any case, some other jolt, probably electricity,
will be needed to get the heart beating and the brain working
again, assuming, of course, that the mush brain has been
reconstructed into a healthy brain.

Some
preserved by cryonics have the head severed from
the body after death. Then, either the head alone is preserved,
or both the head and the body are preserved separately. Maybe
some future technology will allow the head to be attached to an
artificial body. It can be imagined without contradiction, as
the philosophers say, so it is not logically impossible that
some day our planet will be inhabited by bodiless heads that are
connected to machines that allow either actual or virtual
experiences of any kind imaginable without requiring the head to
leave the room. Of course, when that times comes medical science
will have advanced to the point where the aging process can be
reversed or maintained in stasis.

A
business based on little more than hope for developments that
can be imagined by science is quackery.
(Cryonics should not be confused with cryogenics, which is a
branch of physics that studies the effects of low temperatures
on the structure of objects.) There is little reason
to believe that the promises of cryonics will ever be
fulfilled. Even if a dead body is somehow preserved for a
century or two and then repaired, whatever is animated by
whatever process will not be the same person who died. The brain
is the key to consciousness and to who a person is. There is no
reason to believe that a brain preserved by whatever means and
restored to whatever state by nanobots will result in a
consciousness that is in any way connected to the consciousness
of the person who died two centuries earlier.

For
those who want to live forever, cloning might be a more
realistic possibility but I wouldn't bank on it. First, there is
the aging problem. Even if cloning is successful, you won't be
able to clone yourself as younger. Of course, you can hope that
future technology will have solved the aging problem. Perhaps
your body can be cloned repeatedly until science can assist you
to overcome aging. However, there is no reason to believe
that your clone would be a continuation of you. Your
bodies might have identical looking cells, but the only way your
minds could be identical is if you had no experience. (It is
logically impossible for your bodies to have identical
experiences since they occupy different spatial and temporal
coordinates.) In that case, you would be as good as dead.

origin of cryonics

Teacher Robert
Ettinger (physics and math) brought cryonics into the
intellectual mainstream in 1964 with
The Prospect of
Immortality. Ettinger founded the
Cryonics Institute and the related
Immortalist Society. He got the idea for cryonics from a
story by Neil R. Jones. "The Jameson Satellite" appeared in the
July 1931 issue of Amazing Stories. It told the tale of

one Professor Jameson [who] had his corpse
sent into earth orbit where (as the author mistakenly thought)
it would remain preserved indefinitely at near absolute zero.
And so it did, in the story, until millions of years later,
when, with humanity extinct, a race of mechanical men with
organic brains chanced upon it. They revived and repaired
Jameson's brain, installed it in a mechanical body, and he
became one of their company.*

Thus was born the
idea that we could freeze our bodies, repair them at a later
date, and bring them back to life when technology had advanced
sufficiently to do the repairs and the reviving.

ethical & other issues

I will
leave to others to discuss most of the
ethical, legal, political, and
economic issues of cryonics. I'll conclude with some
comments about the cryonics case of Ted Williams.

Williams
died in 2002 at the age of 83. According to his estranged
daughter, Barbara Joyce (Bobby-Jo Ferrell) Williams, he left a
will in which he expressed his desire to be cremated and have
his ashes spread over his favorite fishing grounds in the
Florida Keys. His son (Barbara Joyce's half-brother), John Henry
Williams, arranged for Williams's body to be processed by
Alcor LIfe Extension Foundation.
A story in
SportsIllustrated.com (SI) stated:

Hall of Famer Ted Williams' head and body
are being stored in separate containers at an Arizona cryonics
lab that is still trying to collect a $111,000 bill from Williams' son
[he had already paid $25,000], according to a story
by Tom Verducci in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated.

Alcor still has
Williams's head in a canister and his body in a tank, both
filled with liquid nitrogen (to keep the remains at a cool -321
degrees Fahrenheit). According to SI, Alcor representatives met
with John Henry Williams, but not Ted Williams, about a year
before Ted's death. Furthermore, SI reported that the Consent for
Cryonic Suspension form submitted to Alcor after Williams
had died had a blank line where his signature should have been.

There was a lawsuit
by the estranged daughter
that fizzled, allegedly for lack of funds, but no legal action
by the authorities was taken against John Henry or Alcor. There
is a movement still going to right this ship (see the
Free Ted Williams
website.) Larry Johnson, who worked briefly at Alcor, is leading
the
crusade to get Congress and a couple of state legislatures
to regulate the cryonics industry and have Ted Williams
cremated. A video interview with Johnson on "Good Morning America"
discussing the disposition of Ted Williams's body at Alcor can
be viewed by clicking
here.
Johnson's book on the subject,
Shiver:
A Whistleblower's Chilling Expose of Cryonics and the Truth
Behind What Happened to Ted Williams, is scheduled to be
published in May 2009.